Strategic Business Development is crucial to the long-term prospects of most venture-backed companies. The alliances you form, the agreements you sign and the path you take all work to attract - or repel - your eventual acquirer - and the price!
This blog aims to discuss lessons learned during >25 years in business development for the software industry.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

I just had the honor of being invited back to moderate a panel at the Americas Growth Capital (AGC) Conference, held this past Monday in San Francisco.

It was entitled "Managing the Ultimate Security Perimeter: Identity & Access Management" and featured speakers from across the world of Identity management: Identity Governance and Administration, Privileged Identity Management, Access Management and SSO, and Monitoring and User-Based Analytics.

The reason for posting about that here was to highlight that the belief of the panelists summarized to the fact that customers are now buying best-in-class solutions from each Identity segment and starting to combine them into a comprehensive system that answers the key questions about those who have access to corporate and governmental systems:

Who has access to what?

What should have access to what?

What are they doing with that access?

Is it typical?

Best practice means collecting and auditing accounts and entitlements across the enterprise – on-premises and cloud-based applications and file repositories - into a single view of each Identity with its currently assigned access rights; defining the business models that capture and manage the lifecycle of each Identity and entitlement; then monitoring and recording activity as those accounts and entitlements are used to access application data – highlighting suspicious or high risk behaviors, abnormal privileged user access, unusual insider activity, potentially hijacked credentials – all to detect and prevent insider threats, targeted attacks and fraud.

Why this in a blog about Business Development? Because these systems come together for the customer as a result of strategic BD, and the companies that win are likely to have mastered the concepts of 3DBD - and built win-win relationships with those around them - be they centered on go-to-market or technology.

I plan to watch how this plays out in the next 12-18 months as these vendors replace the large Enterprise Software whose offerings are looking somewhat tired to many customers I talk with.

Watch this space - and I am glad to be back in this space after focusing on the success of one particular company over the past 4 years!